


we will be citizens

by sarapod (four_right_chords)



Series: to be young is to be sad, is to be high [1]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, HIV/AIDS, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-04-13 12:18:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14112189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/four_right_chords/pseuds/sarapod
Summary: "This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come."The Party lives through the plague.





	we will be citizens

_February 1988_

“Steve?”

At the sound of Jonathan’s voice on the phone Steve sits up a little straighter, grinning. “Jonathan, hey!” He talks to Jonathan less than he'd like, but Jonathan’s still in college. He has less free time than Steve, who’s been 9 - 5’ing it since graduation. “What’s up, man? How's it going?”

“Hey, yeah. Um.” Jonathan’s voice is weirdly blank. “You remember my friend Jason?”

“Of course,” Steve says. Jason is Jonathan’s best friend in New York. Steve had met him the last time he was there, over Jonathan’s Christmas break. Nice guy, good photographer. Steve remembers the layers of sweaters he wore, how he was constantly trying to trade seats with whoever was next to a heating vent. Remembers the sharpness of his cheekbones. Billy had asked Steve if he'd mind if Billy used Jason's cheekbones to shave, which conversation had rapidly devolved into Billy’s hands on Steve’s hips and Billy’s mouth on Steve’s cock. Sure, Steve remembers Jason.

“Yeah, uh. He died,” Jonathan says, toneless.

It takes Steve a second to catch up with what Jonathan’s saying, then - “Jesus,” Steve says. “Did he get in an accident or something?”

“No, Steve,” and Jonathan’s - pissed? “Jason’s been - it was fucking pneumonia. PCP,” and. Oh.

Jason was cold all the time. His cheekbones were really sharp. They'd only spent a couple hours together, but Steve feels incalculably stupid. “Jesus,” he says again.

“Yeah,” Jonathan bites out. “I - just please tell me you and Billy are still being careful.”

They've had this conversation a lot in the past few years. “You know we are,” Steve says. “We don't … you know we are.” Steve and Billy are exclusive, a rarity among their friends in Chicago, but they're both way too possessive for anything else to have worked. The thought that Billy’s intense jealousy and the insecurity that used to wash over Steve anytime Billy so much as looked at another guy have probably saved their lives is a truth that will never sit comfortably in Steve’s gut.

Jonathan sighs heavily. “I go to a lot of fucking funerals these days,” he says quietly. “Security at St. Vincent’s knows me by name now. Jason was … it was fast. Faster than usual.”

Steve can't say a word.

“Anyway,” Jonathan says. “I love you. Both of you. Be safe.”

Jonathan started regularly telling Steve he loved him after his second year of college and his seventh funeral.

Steve wakes up that night to Billy sliding into bed next to him. Steve curls into him immediately, and Billy slips an arm around Steve's shoulders and pulls him close, muttering, “Hey, hey baby.” He strokes over Steve’s hair. “What's going on? What’s the matter?”

Steve keeps his face buried in Billy’s chest as he says, “You remember Hot Jason, from New York? Jonathan’s friend?”

“Sure,” Billy says. “Nice guy. Those cheekbones,” and he laughs, kisses the top of Steve's head.

“Yeah,” Steve mutters. “Well. He's fucking dead. PCP. Jonathan called me today.”

Billy stills, then - “Fuck,” he mutters. “He was so skinny, but I didn't - ”

“Me either,” Steve says. He pulls back far enough to meet Billy’s eyes. “How did we both miss it?”

Billy shrugs, pulls Steve close again. “We were feeling good, babe,” he says into Steve's hair. “We were having a good time. It isn't - sometimes we'll miss things.”

Steve says nothing. He can't find the words. He's alive and uninfected and Billy is alive and uninfected and so fucking many of their friends are not that it feels like an insult to their memory to ever miss it. Missing it means forgetting. Forgetting in 1988 is an unimaginable luxury, even for a second, and sometimes Steve thinks the guilt of being able to forget will eat him whole.

Chicago isn’t New York or San Francisco, but it’s  - bad. Steve and Billy have gone to more than their fair share of funerals. It feels like the Upside Down all over again, only this time there’s nothing Steve can beat the shit out of with a nail bat. All there is is marching and protesting and calling his legislators. Steve does all that and then he sits in bed, waiting for the Demodog that is this fucking disease to seize someone else he loves.

 

_November 1988_

When Will comes out to his mom, Joyce weeps. She doesn't care that he's gay, she insists, but he has already almost died twice. There's a part of him that will be in the Upside Down forever - he still has visions sometimes. And that's fine, they can all live with that, but being gay means that Will might _get sick_ and die and they won’t be able to stop it. Gay men die badly now, and in scores. Scores of scores. “A generation of men and boys are dying in the streets in New York!” she rages. “Your brother has been to more funerals than he can remember, Will!” She falls into the couch and covers her face with her hands, then, looking up, grabs Will by the shoulders and actually shakes him a little. “I cannot lose you again, do you hear me?” she says, then falls back, quietly sobbing into her sleeves.

Will feels a little bit like he's just been punched in the chest. Eventually he ghosts a hand over the top of his mom's head and leaves the room. All his feelings are twisted up in his stomach. She seems like she needs space, and he needs …. he's not sure yet, but he needs something other than watching her cry.

Will is in the kitchen with his hands wrapped around a steaming coffee mug when Joyce sits down opposite him and covers his hands with hers. She is looking directly into his eyes. Will can barely breathe.

“I love you no matter what,” Joyce says. “No matter what. I love you and I'm on your side.” She squeezes his hands. “If this is who you are, then we will do whatever we have to so you can be who you are. And you will be safe, so help me God, Will, I will not go to your funeral again, and neither will your brother.”

Will looks at her then, really takes her in, and sees the woman who literally walked into hell to get him out, who brought a town down around her ears, who did not blink or think or pause. Who dragged him out of an actual pit, kicking and screaming and fighting every step of the way. Joyce fought monsters for him and won. That she will also fight the virus suddenly seems like a foregone conclusion.

 

_April 1989_

Chicago and Hawkins aren't actually that far apart, but Steve only sees his parents a few times a year. (He sees the kids a lot more than that.) Their relationship, never particularly strong, had really hit the rocks when Steve opted against college and for another city where he lives with a man. Steve’s mostly fine with it - as fine as he thinks anyone could be, given the circumstances - and he knows he's lucky compared to most of the guys he knows in Chicago. Lucky to have his mom, who may not have rolled out a red carpet for Billy but never gave Steve a hard time about him either. Who never calls Billy anything other than Steve's “ _friend_ ” - she pronounces it with italics - but who has never, not once, permitted Steve's dad to use the slurs Steve can tell he's dying to within Steve's earshot. Who started the only fight Steve's ever seen her pick over the time he was having trouble with his car and his dad took the opportunity to drop some choice words about the mechanical ability of “fairies.” His dad mostly doesn't talk to him now, but he's never tried insulting him again either. So it's something.

It's a fuck of a lot more than Billy’s got.

Billy and Max are good, have been for awhile. Turns out fighting monsters together is a good way to paper over bullshit sibling rivalry and resentment. And anyway, Max has a secret too - her relationship with Lucas. Neil cannot find out about it, at least not until Max is independent. He's never laid a hand on Max, but she is no joke terrified of what he might do if he knew she was dating a -

Well. The thought is enough.

So Max and Billy are okay, but Billy and Neil are. Not. Neil knows about Steve, and while he's probably too much of a pussy to ever do anything about it - Neil prefers his playing fields to be as uneven as possible - Billy makes a point of never letting Steve go out alone when they're in Hawkins. It's always possible that Neil might find some friends.

Billy, for his part, had moved out in the middle of the night the day he turned 18 and never went back, not once. He didn't give Neil the chance to react. When Neil had tried to come after him, Hopper had shrugged - literally, he had actually shrugged his actual shoulders - and said, “There's nothing I can do, Mr. Hargrove. He's an adult. The juvenile system can't do anything with him anymore.”

Anyway. Billy has Max, which is good, and Steve has his mom, which is complicated, and a few times a year Billy and Steve come to Hawkins and have awkward dinner with the Harringtons.

They usually come sometime in April, for his mom’s birthday. She’s 50 this year. Steve had agonized about her present for ages, finally settling on a scarf he thought she might like. It’s such a mom gift that he's embarrassed. It makes him feel cheap even though the scarf was actually pretty expensive, he’d bought it at Marshall Field’s. She likes it, though, which is what matters, smiles at both him and Billy when she opens it.

Steve’s working on a piece of pie and idly wondering when they can leave, when some part of his dad’s monologue about his company works its way into his consciousness and he finds himself saying, “Oh, I remember Jeff Wyatt! He was in, what, receiving? Nice guy. How’s he doing?”

Steve’s dad stills, then lifts his head. His mom’s knife scrapes on her plate, setting his teeth on edge. Something in the room has shifted. Something in his dad’s eyes. There’s a look on his face Steve doesn’t like, and he instinctively flinches back. Closer to Billy.

“Richard - ” Steve’s mom starts, but his dad cuts her off.

“We had to let Jeff go,” he says. He’s looking right at Steve. It’s not a friendly look.

Steve waits for him to say something else, but he doesn’t. He just looks at Steve. Waiting. Steve thinks he might be able to wait him out, but Billy cuts in, arm dropping solidly around Steve’s shoulders. Steve doesn’t flinch. This is the most demonstrative they’ve ever been in front of his parents.

“Why did you have to let Jeff go, _Richard_?” Billy asks. The words flow off his tongue, languorous and smooth. He’s fucking with Steve’s dad.

“Thanks for asking, William,” Richard responds, unfriendly smile brighter than before. Billy may be fucking with him, but he’s also doing exactly what Richard wants him to do. There’s no other way out of this conversation except to physically leave the room. “We had to let Jeff go because he got … sick. Some skin thing. Very unsightly.” He takes a bite of pie, chews. Lets them read between the lines.

Billy’s fingers clench on Steve’s shoulder. “Yeah,” he says, voice steadier than should be possible given the rage Steve can feel in his body. “KS can be pretty rough.”

“Mmm,” Steve’s dad says around a mouthful of pie. Swallowing finally, he says, “Well, whatever it was, we certainly couldn’t have him working with customers and looking like that.”

“Of course not,” Billy says, all faux courtesy and barely lidded fury. “Can't have anyone knowing that Harrington & Co. employed a - ”

“ _Billy_ ,” Steve hisses, and Billy subsides immediately. Steve can roll with a lot, but he fucking will not have Billy upping the ante with his dad like that.

Being with Billy has been surprising in any number of ways, but one of the most unexpected has been how uncompromisingly out he's willing to be, almost reckless. Steve had grown up afraid of words, knowing that no matter how many girls he looked at - wanted - it didn't cancel out the guys, and he was terrified of what that made him. But Billy takes the words the world wants to use against him and wears them like a brand on his forehead, daring anyone to say something. Steve thinks he's bisexual, if that's even a thing (he really had loved Nancy), but when he'd asked Billy about himself, he just smiled his million dollar smile and said, “Nah, baby. I’ve been a fag since I figured out what my dick was for.” In his mouth, the word Steve is so afraid of is blunted somehow.

But at Steve's parents’ dinner table, it's too much. Steve’s dad is smiling like he won something, and his mom snaps, “Richard, that is _enough."_  She starts clearing and Steve jumps up too, grabbing the heavy cake stand out of her hands. One elbow to the ribs later, Billy is also helping, carrying the unwieldy coffee carafe Steve's mom insists on using into the kitchen while Steve follows behind.

They make their exit as shortly thereafter as they can - Steve’s dad has vanished into his office and won't be disturbed - and retreat to the safety of Dustin’s house, where his mom will have left out a package of Chips Ahoy and an unopened can of cat food. This is where they stay when they're in Hawkins, and that's the deal - in exchange for feeding the cat, Steve and Billy are permitted to sleep in the guest room more or less indefinitely. Delia Henderson may or may not realize what they are, but she very clearly does not care.

They're in bed, Billy’s head on Steve's chest, when he says, “You know, we don't have to do this.”

Steve had actually been starting to drift off and is startled back to reality by Billy’s voice. “What are you talking about?”

Billy is idly drawing circles on Steve's chest. “This thing we do where we come here and pretend your dad’s not a bigot and your mom's ever going to do anything other than be perfectly polite. We can just ... not do this.”

Steve sighs, runs a hand through his own hair. Billy’s hatred of Neil often makes him obtuse about Steve’s shitty but extant relationship with his parents. “No one's pretending, Bill,” he says quietly. “My dad is a bigoted shit and probably will be until the day he dies. My mom actually tries, but this is as far as she can go.” He drops his head back and feels the _thunk_ as it hits the wall in his shoulders, which haven't quite let go of the tension from earlier. “I'm not pretending,” he says again. “I'm just taking what I can get.”

Billy is silent for a moment, then begins making his way down Steve's body. Steve laughs, very gently taps the back of Billy’s head. “What are you doing, you shit?” he asks.

Billy presses a kiss to his hip and says, “Taking what I can get?” The grin he shoots Steve is absolutely filthy. Then he doesn't say anything for awhile.

 

_March 1990_

El comes to see them in Chicago sometimes. She's usually on her own. Mike goes to IU Bloomington and Hopper was unwilling to let her move in with her boyfriend halfway across the state at 18, so she still lives with him in Hawkins. College obviously wasn't an option for her, but she was able to get a GED without too much trouble, plus she started working at the Hawkins Library when she was 15 and really took to it. She likes putting things in order, as it turns out. She likes even more rearranging little-used sections using systems known only to herself and trying to convince the librarians that “they're better now.” She has never succeeded, but they love her there, and they’re willing to put up with her idiosyncrasies.

To exactly no one's surprise, she is a horrifying driver and absolutely immune to feedback. She thinks everyone else on the road is an idiot and she is the only competent driver there. Steve finds it easiest to handle her visits when he doesn't allow himself to think about how she got there. Billy likes her sass. Sometimes he sends her twenty bucks for her speeding tickets. A decent amount of the money she makes at work goes towards maintaining herself on Hopper’s insurance. His premiums are unspeakable.

Steve and Billy are sitting on the stoop of the graystone three-flat they call home when she pulls up, beaming from ear to ear, and plants her front left wheel squarely on the curb. She lightly grazes a signpost in the process. Steve knows by now that saying anything is pointless; he just watches as Billy says, “Hey kiddo,” and opens his arms.

El and Billy have gotten along like a house on fire pretty much since they met. In private, Billy calls her his baby brain twin. It’s not like Steve was surprised when he stopped to think about it - their backgrounds are more alike than he would like to admit - but the degree of closeness they have can still take him aback. He’ll never forget the time El, still all childish limbs, had climbed into Billy’s lap, wrapped her arms around his neck, looked at Steve, and said, “You outside. Brain twin time.” Steve’s eyebrows had shot up and he’d turned to Billy, who had shrugged helplessly and said, “You heard her, babe.” Today she just flings herself into Billy’s arms. He always looks a little startled by how much she loves him.

Steve is making chicken and waffles for dinner. It’s one of many compromises he makes to get calories into El that don’t come out of an Eggo box. He makes the waffles himself, and she graciously deigns to eat them. He’s just pulling the last drumsticks out of the boiling oil when he hears yelling from down on the street. “Stevie! Bill! Get your asses down here, I’m going even grayer waiting for you!”

Billy laughs and says, “I’ll get him.” He heads down to let the mystery guy in. El looks at Steve, question on her face, and he says, “A friend of ours is gonna have dinner with us tonight.” She looks skeptical and Steve rolls his eyes. “He's a good guy, El. I think you'll like him. Don't be a dick.”

The front door slams and Steve rolls his eyes again, this time in Billy’s general direction. “I swear to god,” he mutters, but he’s cut off by the world’s worst fake aristocratic accent coming from the hallway and saying, “By my soul, Lord Steven Harrington!”

Steve laughs and turns around to find Chris striking a dramatic pose in the doorway. “Surely, darling,” Chris says, back of his hand pressed to his forehead, “you have something with which to sustain me _somewhere_ on this estate.” He cracks an eye open. “Some meat and drink for the weary traveler?”

“I think we can get something together,” Steve says with a smile. He kisses Chris hello, then turns to introduce him to El. But before he can say more than, “Chris, this is - ” she’s turning to Steve and saying, “Sick not sick?”

El, as it turns out, can see illness. Steve found out a few years ago when he and Billy took her to a demonstration and she spent the entire time looking at people and saying, “Sick. Sick. Sick. Not sick. Sick. Sick. Not sick yet. Sick. Sick. Sick.” Unlike when she normally snooped, she seemed to get more upset with each person she looked at, and Steve and Billy had taken her home early. By the time they got back to the apartment, her face was buried in Billy’s neck and she was shaking.

As soon as the door was closed and locked, she wrenched herself out of Billy’s arms to stand in the middle of the room. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest and said, eyes huge and voice tense, “Why so many sick?”

Steve raked his hands through his hair. “It’s complicated, sweetheart,” he said. “This is a new kind of disease and we can't fix it yet, and - fixing diseases is actually really hard, we have whole government - ”

Billy, thankfully, had stepped in before Steve tried to explain the basics of government-funded research to a kid who had herself been a line item in a budget. He looked El in the eye and said, “The people who are sick mostly don't matter to the people who aren't sick. And because the sick people and the people who make medicine aren't the same, there's no medicine yet.”

El had looked at him for a long time, then said, in a dead-on Southern accent that Steve had never heard come out of her mouth before, “There's no cure for what ails _you_ , honey.” Her eyes were distant. She curled up next to Billy on the couch and flicked on the TV with her mind, turning the dial to a Cubs game. She lost herself in the patterns of baseball, which she weirdly loved, while Billy and Steve tried to get past the creepiness of her laying death sentences on half the people they’d seen that day.

But it's been awhile since that happened, and Steve is not remotely prepared for El to describe Chris’s status out loud in the middle of their kitchen. Chris, on the other hand, immediately drops all his Victorian heroine pretensions and sits down opposite El, expression serious. “That's a pretty good way to explain it, yeah,” he says. “I'm sick-not-sick.”

Chris is a long-term non-progressor, or as Billy calls him, “one of the lucky freaks.” He was diagnosed in ‘84 but proceeded to just ... not get sick. It's been almost seven years, and he's basically fine. He is also a child psychologist, and therefore extremely qualified to answer weird prying questions about his health from a kid whose communication skills are pretty dodgy. “How?” El asks.

Chris shrugs. “If they knew that, honey, I'd be the million dollar man.”

El looks at Chris, head cocked, with an expression Steve recognizes as her ‘snooping face.’ Then she begins to fix herself a plate. Telekinetically.

Steve’s stomach clenches. He feels rooted to the ground. Behind Chris, Billy’s eyes are dinner plates and he's gone completely white. “El,” he says, strangled.

Her face is a picture of blissful unconcern as she drowns her chicken and waffles in a thoroughly excessive amount of real maple syrup. “It's ok,” she says. “I snooped.” Then she looks up at Chris. “Sorry.” She is clearly not sorry.

“She’s,” Steve starts, then stops. Where to even begin?

“Special,” Billy cuts in. His hands are shaking, and he jams them in his pockets. “She's special.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Chris says. He maintains outward calm as he begins to fix his own plate, but Steve watches him narrowly miss knocking his water glass into his lap at least twice while serving himself. Over Chris’s head, he meets Billy’s eyes. Billy looks about three seconds away from passing out, but there’s nothing to do at this point other than sit down and fix their plates too.

“So, chicken and waffles, huh?” Chris says, clearly reaching for something to say.

El looks up, very serious. “Waffles are important, Chris,” she says. Then she takes her own and begins to build a tower.

 

_January 1991_

Will is sitting on their couch with his knees drawn up to his chin when Steve gets home from work.

Will has a key to Billy and Steve’s apartment, has since he moved to Chicago for college. Columbia College has a great art education program, which is what Will wants to do, but Steve knows that a lot of why he chose it was to be close to Steve and Billy. Despite Steve's generalized discomfort with the concept, he and Billy are basically Will's gay mentors. He’s been coming to them with questions about sex and dating and being gay since he was in high school. It makes sense - they were the only gay people he knew before college - but it kind of makes Steve want to light himself on fire with embarrassment. Billy, who fucked around kind of a lot in California and knew lots of gay guys, is much more comfortable with it. He tends to field most of the questions while Steve keeps the coffee coming.

This is different, though. Will doesn't look like he's here with some urgent question about blow jobs. He also doesn't usually come over unannounced. Steve drops his bag and is taking off his shoes as he says, “Hey bud. What’s up?”

Will barely lifts his head enough to be heard. “Me and Paulie got tested,” he says.

Steve is standing in front of a chair, and he drops into it like his strings have been cut. He tries to keep his face composed, but this is basically his worst fucking nightmare. He clenches his hands together and leans his elbows on his knees. “And?” he says.

Will shrugs miserably. “I'm negative,” he says.

Steve feels weak all over, suddenly. Thank God. Thank fucking god.

But the conversation isn't over. “And Paulie?” Steve says gently, already knowing the answer. Will's face crumples before he can say anything, and Steve is out of his chair and pulling a shuddering Will into his arms when Billy walks in.

Before he can say anything, Steve meets his eyes over the top of Will’s head. “Paulie’s positive,” he says, and Billy’s jaw tightens.

Paulie is Will’s first serious boyfriend. They're as out as they can be - Paulie’s met Joyce and Jonathan, Mike and the others. He basically seems like a good kid, though the source of Will's delirious passion for him has eluded Steve from the get-go. It doesn't matter now, though, with Will coming apart in Steve's arms. Billy, wordless and face grim, sits down on Will's other side and wraps his arms around them both.

When the shaking has settled down and Will is mostly just sniffling, Steve untangles himself and strokes a hand over Will's head. “Where's Paulie now?” he asks.

“Home,” Will says. “He … asked me to stay somewhere else tonight.” He keeps it together, but it’s clearly an effort.

Steve gets up and heads into the bedroom to get the extra blankets as he hears Billy say, “You can crash here, Zombie Boy. Can't have you wandering the streets - might get a hankering for some brains and then we'd all be screwed.” Steve hears Will giggle wetly and is struck by a sudden, fierce gratitude for Billy, who can make Will laugh even in this endless awful moment.

 

* * *

 

Steve wakes up the next morning to the smell of pancakes and coffee. He hauls himself into the kitchen to find Billy at the stove and Will at the table, blearily clutching a cup of coffee close to his chest and staring into the middle distance. Steve stops on his way to the coffee machine to wrap an arm around Billy from behind and drop a kiss on his shoulder, muttering “hey” into his spine. Steve and Billy normally aren’t demonstrative in front of the kids, but Steve tries to make a point of being demonstrative in front of Will specifically. For all his discomfort with the gay mentor thing, he’s acutely aware of what he and Billy mean to Will, and he thinks it’s important that Will see them be affectionate. Lord knows Steve never saw two men be affectionate with each other when he was Will’s age. He didn’t know any other gay couples until he and Billy moved to Chicago.

“Hey babe,” Billy answers. He reaches up to squeeze Steve's hand but doesn't look up from the pancakes, so Steve fixes himself a cup of coffee and sits at the table across from Will. He's taking a sip and trying to figure out where to even start with the conversation they need to have when Billy, still focused on the stove, says, “What’s next?”

“Huh?” Steve says, looking up.

“Not you. Him,” Billy says.

Will's brow furrows in confusion. “What?” he asks. He looks at Steve for clarification, but Steve just shrugs. He's not sure where Billy’s going with this either.

“What's next?” Billy repeats. He slides the last three pancakes onto the plate and sets it down in the middle of the table. He raises his eyebrows at Will, but Will looks totally lost. Billy sighs, sits down, and begins making himself a plate. “Listen, bud,” he says. “You got some bad news. Maybe the worst news a person can get right now. But the world doesn't stop turning just because you got bad news.”

Steve’s eyebrows shoot up to his hairline. Will just looks stunned.

“Uh,” Steve starts, and realizes he has no idea what to say. “What I think Billy means -”

“Shut up, Harrington,” Billy says. “I love you, but you have no idea what I mean.” He puts his utensils down and looks right at Will. “He told you to leave. Fine, probably the right move. But he's alone now. He's alone, with this - this _thing_ inside him - ” Billy’s fists clench, and he glares down at his pancakes.

He looks up after a second and says, “A lot of people want us dead.” Steve winces but Billy plows on, eyes never leaving Will. “It was never hard for me to get that, I grew up in a house with someone who wanted me dead. But I think it’s harder for people like you. People who were loved right.”

Will levels a look at Billy that has Steve wincing again, this time in sympathy for Billy. “I spent a week getting chased by a Demogorgon, and I had the Mind-Flayer inside of me,” Will says. “I know what it’s like for something to want me dead.”

Billy nods. “So you know what I mean when I say that the worst thing you can do to someone who wants you dead is to live.” He sighs, runs his hands through his hair (no longer a mullet, thank god). “They want us dead, Will,” he says quietly. “All we have is each other. Until they figure out how to medicate thousands of fags - and they’re not in any fucking rush - until then, all we have is each other.” He reaches blindly across the table and takes Steve’s hand. He doesn’t look at him. Steve can’t take his eyes off Billy.

Will is quiet for a few minutes. Finally, he says, “I need to call my mom.”

He goes to use the phone in their bedroom. When the door is shut behind him, Billy collapses a little bit. He takes a deep inhale, staring at the tabletop. He doesn’t loosen his grip on Steve’s hand.

“What was all that?” Steve asks softly, running his thumb back and forth over Billy’s knuckles.

Billy looks up, looks right at Steve and says, “If I hadn’t met you, I’d be dead.”

“... Billy,” Steve says, shocked. "You don’t - ”

“No,” Billy says firmly. “I would be dead. I’d have been fucking around for all these years I’ve been with you, and I would _not_ have been careful, hell, I’d probably have been chasing the fucking bug. And I would have gotten sick and I would have died alone, in the hospital, covered in my own shit and blood with no one except the night nurse to help me through it.” Billy looks away, jaw clenched, and says, “Except I fucking found you, and instead I have this.” The wave of his hand encompasses breakfast, their apartment, the kid in their bedroom.

“I don’t really like Paulie,” Billy says after a second.

Steve snorts. “Me either.”

Billy smiles and sighs. “But Will loves him. And … no one deserves _that_.”

They’re sitting quietly when Will emerges from the bedroom. He looks better. “I'm gonna go find Paulie. Mom’s driving down tonight with Hop,” he says. “And we’re going to figure out what’s next.”

 

_EPILOGUE_

In 1996, Steve spends a day watching Chris play Prior Walter in _Angels in America._ It’s staged by a local gay theater company. The production is unimaginably ambitious, but it’s actually pretty good. Billy mostly hates theater, but at Chris’s insistence, he comes for “Perestroika _._ ” Will and his latest boyfriend, Marcus, are sitting on Steve’s other side. Paulie’s not quite dead a year; Will stayed with him until the end. He’s 24, and sometimes Steve remembers that Will is already more of a grown-up than Steve hopes he’ll ever have to be at almost 30.

A funny thing is happening all over the country - AIDS deaths seem to be falling off a cliff. No one wants to count their chickens, but the new drugs seem like they might actually work. Jonathan called Steve last week to say that he hadn’t been to a funeral in two months; he sounded jubilant. In bed last night, Steve and Billy started counting their friends who were positive and alive, and the number is close to what it was at the end of ‘95. For the first time in Steve’s adult life, people aren’t dying. For the first time since he was 17, there isn’t a monster of some kind banging down his door and threatening everything he holds dear.

He’s thinking about this as he watches Chris, who twelve years in is also not dead, stand on stage with the other actors bickering behind him and deliver Prior’s closing monologue. He’s bathed in light.

"This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore.”

Steve chances a look at Will. He’s clutching Marcus’s hand as tears roll down his cheeks. Steve loves him.

“The world only spins forward.

We will be citizens.

The time has come."

 

**Author's Note:**

> AIDS and Ronald Reagan killed a generation of gay men and many others, a generation of sons and brothers and fathers and cousins and uncles and nephews. The scale of the loss is incredible. 
> 
> Stranger Things as a fandom is oddly positioned vis-a-vis history. Canon is set in the 80s, but for pretty obvious diegetic reasons, canon has nothing to say about the major historical events of that time. As a result, fannish writers aren't necessarily prompted to consider the political realities of the 80s when we write our slashfic, even though being gay in the 80s was maybe the most political it's ever been. 
> 
> This is also a pretty young fandom. In relation to the epidemic, I'm pretty young - I was born in 1987. I don't think it's possible for those of us who didn't live through it to comprehend the scale of what was going on; at the same time, it's our responsibility to try. There are some great oral history projects collecting the stories of the survivors, and I encourage you to [check](http://www.actuporalhistory.org/) [them](https://www.nypl.org/voices/audio-video/oral-histories/aids) [out](https://www.library.ucsf.edu/archives/aids/oral-history-project/). For a quick read on what it was like to care for AIDS patients in the 80s, [this article](https://www.out.com/positive-voices/2016/5/19/meet-woman-who-cared-hundreds-abandoned-gay-men-dying-aids) is great. [This Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/tucker_shaw/status/1041839498999603202) is also an excellent summary of living and being young in the middle of the plague.
> 
> AIDS is no longer a death sentence, but it is by no means gone; it has just switched its prevalence to marginalized groups. [Gay Men's Health Crisis](http://www.gmhc.org/) continues to do great work with affected communities, as do many other organizations.
> 
> The title and summary of this piece are taken from Tony Kushner's brilliant _Angels In America_ , which is a story about what it means to be American, whether you're a white Jewish man or a gay black former drag queen or a Mormon.
> 
> I am not a gay man who lived through AIDS, and while I did my best to strike the right tone, I'm sure I messed up plenty. Please let me know if there's something I can make more accurate. I did my best.


End file.
